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Statistics and Economic History1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Simon Kuznets
Simon Kuznets
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania and National Bureau of Economic Research
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Extract

This paper deals with the relation between statistical analysis as applied in economic inquiry and history as written or interpreted by economic historians. Although both these branches of economic study derive from the same body of raw materials of inquiry—the recordable past and present of economic society—each has developed in comparative isolation from the other. Statistical economists have failed to utilize adequately the contributions that economic historians have made to our knowledge of the past; and historians have rarely employed either the analytical tools or the basic theoretical hypotheses of statistical research. It is the thesis of this essay that such failure to effect a close interrelation between historical approach and statistical analysis needs to be corrected in the light of the final goal of economic study.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 1941 , pp. 26 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1941

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References

2 Quarterly Journal of Economics (February, 1939), 167–193.

3 Ibid., 167–168.

4 Ibid., 168.

5 Methods in Social Science (Chicago, 1931), 435–445Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 435–436.

7 Ibid., 443.

8 Journal of Political Economy, April 1932.